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My most recent book, The ParadoxalCompass, is published by Notting Hill Editions. You can read about it here. The book launched at the 2017 Penzance Book Festival and an extract appeared in the London Magazine. Paula Read at Review 31 said this and Linda Chown said that. In April 2018, in Chideock Village Hall, I used it to help answer the question Why Should We Care What Happens in Lyme Bay? The book was featured at the 2018 Hay-on-Wye literary festival. You can find out more about it in the Books section of this website.

It recently received a five-star rating in the NRC Handelsblad, for those who can read Dutch. There was an article about it, ‘Navigating Francis Drake’s Legacy’, in the New European newspaper in July and a feature, ‘Charting a Different Course’, in the July / August 2018 issue of Resurgence.

‘Morpurgo’s thrilling, alarming approach to history insists on stitching the past back into the present and the future.’ – Adam Mars-Jones

The artist Angela Cockayne (Ark Embrace and the Moby Dick Big Read) has responded to the book with a ‘chart’ of its contents:

I participated in the campaign to establish a Marine Protected Area in Lyme Bay and have written about its wider implications for marine protection in English waters. The Dorset Wildlife Trust Magazine (summer 2017) ran an article about it and there are five articles on the subject from the Ecologist, from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2018. Lush Times published another on a related theme in 2018. The Paradoxal Compass is about, among other things, the longer history of the West Country’s relationship with the sea and marine conservation’s place in that story. It concludes with a discussion of Lyme Bay.

In 2013 I helped to put on a related event, OUR SEA NEEDS OUR SAY, which can be viewed on line, courtesy of Dorset Eye. I interview Philip Hoare, Callum Roberts and George Monbiot about marine conservation on stage at the Electric Palace in Bridport. The first part is here and the second part is here

Extracts from the pamphlet I wrote about the migrant crisis (see ‘Books’) have been published as ‘The View from Mount Eryx’ in the the PN Review. I wrote an essay for Review 31 on the same theme, which is also a review of Peter Mason’s ‘The Ways of the World’.

My literary essays and reportage on the environment and on Central / East European affairs have appeared in many magazines and journals, as well as online. My work has appeared in The London Magazine, The Edinburgh Review, Resurgence, Areté, PN Review, New Internationalist, The Ecologist,Three Monkeys Online, Review 31 and elsewhere. I studied at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh and now live in the South West of England.

The whole collection has a freshness and a surprisingness which are a delight… I hope lots of people will read this book – for its vigour as well as its vision.

Ronald Blythe

See the Books page for more detail.

A previous book, How Thomas Hardy Expressed His Doubt – some reflections on Weymouth’s Olympic Road and the resulting destruction of Bincombe Down is a lengthy essay published in book form. It is available at Waterstones in Dorchester. Excerpts from this book have been posted on the Woodland Trust website – you can read them here.

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